Skepticism

EVENTS

Metamorphosis tonight

Just so you know, we’re rolling out a major site redesign in the middle of the night tonight. Alex, our tech guy, is doing it in a smart way by getting it running on a shiny new server first, and then swapping in the IP address of the old one to bring it all live quickly. As with any new design, I expect gasps of horror tomorrow that it’s different — but it’s happening anyway, and productive suggestions to tweak it will be just fine. You’ll just have to adapt.

Most importantly, once we get the redesign out of the way, we’ve got a great big backlog of new additions to the roster who’ve been waiting for this obstacle to be cleared. Expect great new content to follow!

I will be horrified if the design butchers itself in older browsers, or it causes the content to run off the right edge of the screen on non-widescreen resolutions (though the site already does the latter as it is).

*deep breath*
*whispers*
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing….only I will remain

They’re also doing upgrades at my local Safeway tonight. Coincidence? I think NOT!

I hate it when they do upgrades at my local Safeway. I like it just the way it is, thank you very much. And when the manager decides to do some ‘clever’ cross-marketing by hiding the bacon in a totally not meat related aisle, well, I don’t consider it clever, I consider it malicious. I just about had a panic when I heard that the Albertsons parent company bought Safeway. I did suggest they could rename the stores SafeAlbert, though.

chimera #27, WordPress handles avatars through their Gravatar system, which siteowners cannot override except by getting rid of customisable Gravatars for everybody. If you’re unable to change the Gravatar tied to the email address you’re using you need to take it up with gravatar.com

2 issues that immediately jump out though – The grey text in this here comment box? I almost can’t read what I’m typing. Also the post and preview buttons are way ugly. And, PZ, your own comments no longer have their red text and stand-out background.

I have to second the gray text in the comment composition box. Same for the gray text in blockquoted text, though it’s not as hard to read. Still, gray text over a white background is always bad.
Also, I just wish the links to other blogs didn’t automatically open in a new tab. I can right click to open in a new tab.
That’s pretty much it. Otherwise, it’s a website and allows me to read stuff, so it’s doing its job.

Maybe I am just missing it, but is there no longer going to be a section on the left hand nav for recent posts around FtB? I found that was a great way to discover new and interesting posts, especially on blogs I do not regularly read.

I’ve never had problems with “changing” designs. But finally your sight actually has some design – the previous header with a ‘missing’ bar and waves in the background was just an insult to webdesign everywhere.

Mostly I’m happy if the page works though, which means I have to mention that I’m missing the “next post” “previous post” links in the header. There seems to be space for them, but they’re just not displaying for me..

I have to agree with Galactic Fork on two issues as well. I can open links in a new tab all on my own, I do not need help. Unless someone can come up with a really compelling reason for this behaviour I do not think it should occur, w3 recommends against it in most cases. Also, comment numbers are really nice on a blog like this. If you are not going to use threaded comments (a decision that makes me happy, for I really dislike them) then you really need an easy way to refer back to previous comments. It is not much of an issue when the average comment section is only a few comments, but that is definitely not the case here, where there can be hundreds of comments, with many of them referring to previous comments.

If you turn off page styles (in Firefox, View → Page Style → No Style), you can see the comment numbers (that is, the comments are an ordered list (<ol>) whose numbering is suppressed by the “Basic Page Style”).

The “Sponsored from around the web” ads, if your window is not wide enough, wrap around and overlap the top of the comments box, at least in Pale Moon (which is based on Firefox; I couldn’t stand that stupid Chrome-clone interface they introduced and had to find an alternative). I could make my window wider, but it already covers over half of my screen, and I’d prefer to continue being able to use the other half while browsing.

Comments forced into a single half-width comment are more difficult to read than page-wide comments.

And are those nested comments I see, at Pharygula?

Add those two factors together and you very quickly end up with the farcical one-word wide comments; ie, every comment (after a certain nesting depth) becomes a column of single words strung out down the length of the page. This is bad enough wherever nested comments are deployed, but happens twice as often (or twice as early in the nesting) when the column is half as wide as it could be.

Echoing the plea for numbering. Preferably imposed from FTB, without our having to make changes at our respective ends? Some of us are highly technically incompetent, you know. ::iz hopeful::

Oh, and I don’t suppose there’s any chance of having all those nice things like strikethrough etc. available as formatting buttons, as standard? (I use an add-on to make it handier (one that some kind Pharyngulite recommended ages ago) but it only has some of the requisite buttons, not all).

1. Comment numbers please (I appreciate the tip from Owlmirror, but that shouldn’t be required for shit as basic as comment numbers).
2. Recent posts from around FTB in the sidebar please.
3. In a mobile browser (Chrome in Android on Galaxy 3 mini) the comments look like absolute shit. The text is just half-screen wide, the left half of the screen is blank, and a quote contained within a comment is 1/4 screen wide, which basically means a column of words that’s completely unreadable because it doesn’t look like text.
4. Also, the last ad overrides the first comment.

Comment numbers have disappeared into the middle of the icons for each commenter. Also, there is a left side bar that goes all the way down, with only speckled grey filling to the right of it. Then the content begins below the ending of the right column ads, and takes much longer to load. The opening freethoughtblogs.com page is essentially unreadable.

Thank you Daz – very kind of you! I just had a quick read through, and I think that my usage and predilections (i.e. “Aaaagh!!! If it’s not incredibly simple – no, even simpler than that – I shall have conniptions. Many, many conniptions. Possibly while clutching pearls, reeling, writhing and fainting in coils at the same time”) mean I should probably stick with the Firefox formatting toolbar I have now, incomplete and partially non-operative though it is. Phrase Express does sound like something a lot of people around here might appreciate, though.